Expectations: A war with self

We were born out of expectations and we even die with some. In this world full of good, bad, love, hate, right and wrong there is a thing called ‘EXPECTATION’. Every individual may have a different opinion regarding expectation but for me, I identify it as a war.

A war with our thoughts, our dreams, our aspirations, our existence and in a nutshell a war with self. In this era of worldly pleasures and sky rocketing dreams and so much more. Man has in a way made life difficult for himself because of ‘continuous expectations’ from himself or the people around him.

It is less about basic needs today and more about desires. In our continuous fight between the two worlds of how life is and how we want it to be we actually lose the essence of what we have in present. We set expectations for our friends, family, teachers, colleagues, boss and many more to act in a particular way or to respond in another way and also set expectation for ourself to compete more and achieve more and earn more and buy more and then spend more and eventually we are left with no more.

The sad part about expecting is that you not only burden the other person with an additional pressure but also burden yourself with the load of expecting something from someone. His success or failure in making up to it will lead you happy or sad and thus you just made yourself a slave of your own expectations.

Since childhood, parents and relatives keep telling us how we should sit, stand, react, respond, feel etc. It is good because until then we had no expectations from them, neither they had from us but once you start growing up, you realize that life is all about expecting. Parents expecting you to score well, teachers expecting you to participate, boss expecting you to bag the target, friends expecting you to hangout, someone expecting you to love them back and you getting drowning amongst all those things trying to figure out what you want.

And when you actually realize that instead of expecting from others or yourself, you just need to figure out what you really want, chances are that you might have already missed the train or boarded some other. It is really important to differentiate amongst setting goals for someone or setting expectations for someone. We, as humans, have in our blood to keep expecting until we realize that believing is more important than expecting.

Believing in your relations, people, friends, situations, fate, karma, life and God. A belief is something that will never do you harm, if no good but an expectation has the tendency to make your life go upside down. You can choose your own belief and still not worry about it. But expectations make you stressed mentally and weak emotionally. Whereas, belief gives you the courage to be brave, to have faith in something you believe and spread it to others and not worry about its outcomes. Life will be ideal to live when their will be more faith than fear of broken expectations.